Extra step blocks warrants for fugitives

Fugitive Kevin Scott avoided capture for nearly five years
despite being wanted in St. Louis County for three robberies. It
wasn't because he avoided arrest. Police picked him up at least
five times in two states.

For every arrest, police had his real name and date of birth.
Scott avoided capture for a much simpler reason: Authorities

here didn't issue a warrant for his arrest.

And they haven't done so for thousands of other felony
fugitives, who can flee the area, get stopped by police elsewhere
and avoid being returned to face justice.

A Post-Dispatch investigation has found that St. Louis is one of
the few major metro areas in the nation that routinely decline to
issue arrest warrants for fugitives. Of all the cases of St. Louis
suspects sought for felonies, a third lack warrants.

Police elsewhere don't know when they've stumbled upon one of
these fugitives because, without warrants, their names are not
allowed in a database police check nationwide. And should police
find out they are suspects in a St. Louis crime, they usually won't
arrest them without warrants.

Police say they don't know how often these fugitives have
committed crime elsewhere. Authorities don't release their names,
making it nearly impossible for the Post-Dispatch to determine how
many have been let go by police elsewhere.

Victims in the area are left to assume all is being done to find
the perpetrators. Victims include cabdriver Jerald Murray, who
picked Scott out of a photo lineup weeks after a robbery in
2001.

"It's ridiculous," Murray said. "I think that every citizen in
this city and state should be outraged."

EVIDENCE, BUT NO WARRANT

The practice can be traced to how St. Louis city and county
authorities treat a certain type of fugitive.

Most of the area's fugitives are sought the traditional way. If
a defendant skips court, or violates probation or parole, a judge
issues an arrest warrant. That becomes the legal OK for police
anywhere to arrest the person.

What separates the St. Louis area from much of the rest of the
nation is how it handles suspects on the front end of the criminal
justice process - those who have yet to be caught by police and go
before a judge.

In most other places, when someone is suspected of a crime and
can't be found, authorities go to a judge and seek an arrest
warrant. If the judge decides there's enough evidence to charge the
person, the warrant is issued, and police anywhere have legal
backing to arrest the person.

But in St. Louis, there's another step.

No matter how much evidence has been gathered, authorities
commonly can't or won't get an arrest warrant until they find and
question the suspect. In St. Louis city, it's the police department
that has instituted the unwritten policy. In St. Louis County, it's
the prosecutor's office.

Officials from both places say the policy ensures that the right
person is charged. Victims may lie. Witnesses can be confused.
Suspects may have alibis.

"What we want is the full investigation finished, or as close to
finished as possible, before there's a warrant application," said
St. Louis County Prosecutor Robert P. McCulloch. "And that almost
always means picking up the guy."

Only in extreme or unusual cases is the informal rule waived -
such as when suspects are considered particularly dangerous or
police discover they have fled the metro area.

The practice is concentrated in St. Louis city and county. In
other area counties, prosecutors tend to follow the practice for
non-violent felonies, but almost always issue warrants quickly for
violent felonies - whether or not the person has been questioned
first.

Authorities say the practice spans decades but can't pinpoint
who started it, when or why.

It has resulted in an unusual category of fugitive: sought on
something called a "wanted."

THE 'WANTED'

Police - not judges - issue wanteds. Police insist they use the
same standard judges do: There's enough evidence, or "probable
cause," to arrest the person.

On Oct. 31, the most recent data available, police had issued
4,387 wanteds for felonies in St. Louis city and county.

Once issued, wanteds are treated locally just like warrants.

They're put into the local police fugitive database used by most
departments on the Missouri side of the region. When officers come
across someone sought on a wanted, the suspect is handcuffed and
hauled to jail.

The real problem comes from how other departments view
wanteds.

Federal fugitive task forces based in St. Louis and many
agencies outside the region don't arrest people on wanteds,
according to law enforcement officials. Fearing lawsuits over false
arrest, they want a judge's OK to detain someone.

Overland police learned that in the case of Ronnie Fleck, who
beat and robbed a man of $12,000 in casino winnings.

The day of the robbery in 2005, detectives had casino
surveillance video showing Fleck following the victim out of the
lot. The victim identified Fleck from a photo lineup. So did the
victim's wife and mother-in-law, whom Fleck also punched that day.
They also wrote down the robber's license plate number. It was for
a car registered to Fleck's girlfriend, who said Fleck had been
driving it.

Police issued a wanted.

Within a month, detectives learned that Fleck had probably fled
to a relative's home in a suburb of Detroit. Police there were
happy to join the hunt - if there was an arrest warrant for
him.

But St. Louis County prosecutors wouldn't budge. They first
wanted proof Fleck was in Michigan, according to reports.

Fleck eventually returned to St. Louis and was arrested six
months after the robbery.

Fleck refused to admit to anything - offering no more evidence
than police had before he was arrested, reports show.

But with Fleck in custody, prosecutors formally secured the
arrest warrant and later convicted him of the robbery.

WANTEDS BARRED

In Fleck's case, police caught him because he returned to St.
Louis and officers were still actively hunting him.

With limited staffs - and the sheer number of fugitives - the
most effective tool to capture fleeing fugitives is often the
computer. When police stop anyone, they usually check state and
national police databases of warrants.

But the databases don't take wanteds.

The national database, run by the FBI, and the Missouri
database, run by the highway patrol, both insist that fugitive
entries be backed by a judge's order to arrest. The only exception
is if police can't quickly find a judge to sign a warrant. In those
cases, the alert is erased after 48 hours.

Only the local fugitive database, run by a board of local police
officials, accepts wanteds.

In past years, some wanteds were coded to get into state and FBI
databases. But the FBI and highway patrol discovered the entries in
2006 and kicked them out.

"I'm sure there have been isolated cases over the years of an
agency that entered a record but didn't really have a warrant,"
said the FBI's Roy Weise, who has helped run its database for
decades. "(But) not on the scale of St. Louis. I think we were all
kind of surprised when we heard that was going on."

An FBI task force is trying to get police across the nation to
enter all their fugitives' names into the databases. The task force
chairman, Michael McDonald, said it was rare for areas to not enter
names because they wouldn't get warrants.

"That is really so bizarre," said McDonald, a Delaware State
Police administrator. "Why don't they just issue the warrant?

"Most jurisdictions would."

PROBLEM UNRESOLVED

Local authorities estimated about 3,500 wanteds were kicked out
of the state and FBI databases. The action became a hot topic at
meetings of the area police chiefs association in late 2006. Chiefs
considered ways to get wanteds back in the databases but decided it
couldn't be done.

They spoke with McCulloch, who reiterated that his office would
consider seeking warrants in specific cases, if asked.

"It's definitely a concern for law enforcement," said the
association's past president, Dale Curtis, the Webster Groves
police chief.

St. Louis County police occasionally put a wanted into the FBI
database as a temporary 48-hour entry. Then they will re-enter it
every time it is erased - a violation of database rules. Last year,
the agency re-entered the same wanted 52 times to help catch a
murder suspect who fled Missouri.

But temporary entries are rare. Last week, there were only 12 in
the metro area that had been passed on to the state and FBI
databases.

In the city of St. Louis, police decided to keep their policy of
getting warrants when "information develops" that a suspect has
fled.

Lt. Col. Roy Joachimstaler said, "We certainly have a concern"
that suspects will flee and avoid capture because they're not in
the state or FBI databases.

"But as we got into it and looked at it, (in) the large majority
of cases, the wanted suspects stayed in this area," Joachimstaler
said.

'WANTED' BUT LET GO

Still, that leaves a gap: fugitives who flee, without police
finding out they're gone.

Fugitives such as Kevin Scott.

Jennings police say that over three weeks in December 2001, an
armed Scott tried to rob a cabdriver, successfully robbed Murray
and robbed a woman in her driveway.

Police quickly focused on Scott, 22, because the woman said she
knew him from the neighborhood. The two cabdrivers separately
picked out his picture. Then another woman confessed that she was
an accomplice of Scott's in one of the robberies.

As is the custom, Jennings police issued a wanted.

Scott didn't stay in St. Louis.

A month after the robberies, Minneapolis police arrested Scott
for domestic assault, records show. He was arrested four more times
in Minnesota and Illinois, and was imprisoned more than three years
in Illinois for taking part in armed robberies there.

Records show the wanted came up only when Scott was released
from prison in 2006. By then, it had somehow ended up in the FBI
database - months before the FBI kicked all wanteds out - but the
entry noted it was valid in Missouri only.

So Illinois prison officials paroled Scott.

Scott ventured back to St. Louis County in the summer of 2006
and was quickly arrested on the wanted. But St. Louis County
prosecutors declined to press charges.

Their reason? Police had taken too long to find him.

A NEW CRIME

In reviewing the file last year, McCulloch said Jennings police
could have come to his office in 2002 to pitch their case for a
warrant. He said his office made exceptions.

But Jennings police Detective Dave Joyce said police knew of
prosecutors' policy to refuse to secure a warrant unless officers
could prove the suspect had fled. They had no proof, so they issued
a wanted.

In February 2007 - six months after prosecutors decided to drop
the robbery case - Scott was one of three men who kidnapped and
slashed the throat of an Alton man, police say.

Madison County authorities issued an arrest warrant, which went
into the FBI database. Minneapolis police found Scott and the
warrant four months later.

In a phone interview from the Madison County Jail, Scott denied
he murdered anyone. He also denied the robbery allegations but said
he wished authorities had brought him back to face them in 2002, so
he could clear his name then.

Both cabdrivers wish he'd been returned in 2002, but for a
different reason: They didn't want him hurting anyone.

"The reason I went down and picked him out (of a photo lineup in
Jennings) is because I didn't want him to do it to other people,"
said one of the drivers, Richard Mayo. "And what I attempted to do
didn't work. What I feared happened."